Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure is directed to equipment for testing integrated circuits and semiconductors.
Description of the Related Art
As microcircuits continually evolve to be smaller and more complex, the test equipment that tests the microcircuits also evolves. There is an ongoing effort to improve microcircuit test equipment, with improvements leading to an increase in reliability, an increase in throughput, and/or a decrease in expense.
Mounting a defective microcircuit on a circuit board is relatively costly. Installation usually involves soldering the microcircuit onto the circuit board. Once mounted on a circuit board, removing a microcircuit is problematic because the very act of melting the solder for a second time ruins the circuit board. Thus, if the microcircuit is defective, the circuit board itself is probably ruined as well, meaning that the entire value added to the circuit board at that point is lost. For all these reasons, a microcircuit is usually tested before installation on a circuit board.
Each microcircuit must be tested in a way that identifies all defective devices, but yet does not improperly identify good devices as defective. Either kind of error, if frequent, adds substantial overall cost to the circuit board manufacturing process, and can add retest costs for devices improperly identified as defective devices.
Microcircuit test equipment itself is quite complex. First of all, the test equipment must make accurate and low resistance temporary and non-destructive electrical contact with each of the closely spaced microcircuit contacts. Because of the small size of microcircuit contacts and the spacings between them, even small errors in making the contact will result in incorrect connections. Connections to the microcircuit that are misaligned or otherwise incorrect will cause the test equipment to identify the device under test (DUT) as defective, even though the reason for the failure is the defective electrical connection between the test equipment and the DUT rather than defects in the DUT itself.
A further problem in microcircuit test equipment arises in circuits which run at high frequencies. Prior art test systems cannot handle these frequencies reliably or without signal losses. Furthermore, shielding of high frequency (HF) ports prevents interference with adjacent ports.